Thursday, 22 August 2013

Movie Review: Main Hoon Shahid Afridi (DAWN)

For anyone vaguely interested in rolling along
with Pakistani cinema’s new-blood revival would have given a smidgen of
consideration to Main Hoon Shahid Afridi (MHSA), the ‘first’ Pakistani
sports-flick dunked deep in family drama starring Humayun Saeed, Noman Habib,
Javed Sheikh, Nadeem Baig, Ismail Tara, Shafqat Cheema – and about a gazillion
cameos from anyone abstractedlylinked to the industry.

Bearing in mind the bash of a premiere
yesterday, think of the cameos as family-support for Mr. Saeedand Shahzad
Nasib’ssurefire blockbuster;And, in case anyone forgets about either theiror
ARY Films’ – who distributes the movie along with Mandviwalla Entertainment –
place in the industry, this is one extended family.

The love part from the industry is infectious,
but it never seeps into the feature film; at least not directly. Mr. Saeed
plays Akbar Deen, a pro-cricketer who’s the pride-and-joy of his familythat
includes a mom, a pop (Mr. Baig),a wife (Mahnoor Baloch) and son. Akbar gets
implicated with illegal drugs after he gets drunk by an orange juice drink and
a (quite revealing) dance item by Mathira (the song is Masti Main Doobi by Neeti
Wagh and Shani). It is – quite literally – a flash, which dumps Akbar in a jail
cell and bats his career out of the cricket grounds.

Years later, Shahid (Noman Habib), an
on-the-breadline prodigy youngster from Sialkot who works the cash register in
a local restaurant, pushes the owner of his local cricket club (Ismail Tara,
playing Malick Khalid) to try the team for a Pepsi-sponsored tournament. A few
beats later, and rather vapidly, Akbar signs up as the teams’ coach.

For those of us who are still biased to put MHSA
along Chak De India, I have one thing to say: please don’t.

Mr. Saeed’s film written by Vasay Chaudhary,
working from a scarred-underdog/least bet-team that wins the cup formula,devisesenough
deviations in its revved up pace to make the distinctions obvious. A few
unresolved angles (the husband-wife split-up; the rich father-in-law vs. the
cricketer son-in-law) do dig ruts within MHSA’s narrative. Nevertheless these
are just minor botches that are easily swept under the rug by the speed of
MHSA’s execution.

As performances go, I have a sincere advice for
Mr. Saeed: stop acting for the small-screen.

Mr. Saeed, who mostly equips his acting arsenal
with scowls and growls and a tear drop or two, kicks in some class nuances in
unexpected nooks and crannies. And with 70% (maybe more) screen-time to his
Akbar, Mr. Saeed becomes a central point of weight for MSHA.

Noman Habib, as the engaging rural Shahid
Afridi, piles on the innocence, but more often than not his naivetéand
unsophistication(acting wise) becomes rather apparent.Ms. Baloch is plastic,
and like the most expensive kind is (unblinkingly) fixed in place.Ainy Jaffri,
the big city girl with big,big eyes, who falls for Shahid is flimsy, because of
the way she’s placed in the film – rather like Asym Mehmood, Ainan Arif and
Gohar Rasheed, who are fairly good to average depending on the scale and cliché
of their exposure.

Mr. Arif plays Michael Magnet, a Christian who
makes way for some minor obligatory racial biasness.Like every conflict, the
resolution is nippy if not shrewd (case in point: the estranged father-son
dilemma between Mr. Baig and Mr. Saeed, which piles up, only to open a separate
narrative track). Sometimes – for example, the climax and the cricket matches –
the hastiness works against the anticipation.

Still, for a bulk of its entirety, MHSA swaps
between characters one ends up rooting for: the roll-call includes Majeed
Maulvi, the slightly racist, short-tempered Pathan played by Humza Ali Abbasi,
Mr. Sheikh’s stereotypical villain Asif Qureishi and Mr. Cheema’s brilliantly
played Bashir Bhatti, a worthless, gambling self-indulgent father to Shahid.
The only other actor who stands up to Mr. Cheema’s vivid charisma and dexterity
is Mr. Tara, whose presence even dominates Mr. Saeed in some scenes.

MHSA isn’t unblemished as far as technicality is
concerned. A few issues with color grading (sometimes apparent within cuts in a
continuous location), camera/resolution/sharpness issues in cricket matches
(and no, we aren’t fooled into thinking we’re seeing a televised broadcast) pop
up and fade away, oft times by the sheer aesthetic diligence of putting on the
show. This aesthetic diligence includes three groovy songs by composers Shani
& Kami – JeraVee (Shafqat Amanat Ali, Shani), Angreja (Momin Durrani, Jabar
Abbas)and Masti Mai Doobi; Malaal, the fourth song sung by Rahat Fateh Ali, is
an adequate space filler.

Syed Ali Raza (aka Usama), coming from a
television background, is proficient in setting up cinema-quality frames with a
dastardly penchant to throw the BG out of focus in close-ups. He is also quite
practiced in executing film-level performances from a bulk of his cast (of
course, the expanded gamut and resolution of the RED camera helps here).

The problem with the industry is that no one
wants to appreciate a good mainstream family movie – especially from people
within the film fraternity. I could hear murmurs about art and intelligence, as
soon as I ventured outside the screening. For these self-made connoisseurs of
the medium, I only point to the deafening applause the film collected two or
three times.

A film that looks good, keeps you engaged, lets
you unwind and then coerces (some if not all) to wild-cheering is a product
well-made – and as the tickets will tell – well-sold.